Very few people knew anything about the growing “Residence Life” movement on college campuses prior to the revelations about the program at the University of Delaware last year. In brief, students there were required to participate in group and individual discussion sessions outside of regular classes. The sessions were led by Resident Assistants who had been through an intensive training program and the subject matter consisted of extremely tendentious theories -- often presented, however, as unquestionable truth -- about race, economics, the environment, and so forth.

This whole program (referred to by the university as “the treatment”) was designed by Student Affairs personnel, not faculty members. Its objective – to get students to accept a set of “politically correct” beliefs. Students who disagreed were singled out for criticism.

Delaware’s Res Life program is part of a nationwide project to turn residence halls into new educational centers on campus, not just places where students sleep and do their coursework. Simultaneously, it turns student affairs employees from lowly administrators into very influential educators with their own agenda and curriculum.

Supported by the likes of the Ford Foundation and Pew Charitable Trusts and organized through the American College Personnel Association, the Res Life movement envisions itself as a force for the transformation of the American campus. The movement began in the early 1990s and has been rapidly growing ever since.

Since the University of Delaware story broke, the National Association of Scholars has been diligently investigating to learn more about the “Residence Life” movement. In a series of reports, Dr. Thomas Wood has unearthed a great amount of troubling information. The Res Life movement, Wood shows, is a malignant cancer that is spreading across America’s colleges and universities. It’s an effort to import a new sort of “transformative education” into the curriculum, one that is about indoctrination rather than the search for truth and to which all students would be subjected.

The Res Life program at the University of Michigan is among the oldest and best established. Wood’s research into it reveals much about the goals and methods of the movement.

One of the foremost goals of Res Life, Wood writes, is to help preserve affirmative action programs. Despite Justice O’Connor’s statement in Grutter v. Bollinger that universities may use racial preferences in admissions to obtain the “educational benefits” that supposedly flow from “diversity,” affirmative action proponents know that this is a slender reed. Grutter was only a 5-4 decision and the Court simply took the University of Michigan’s word for it that those benefits exist. In fact, there is evidence that the attempt to sculpt a “diverse” student body is educationally detrimental.

Therefore, the defenders of racial preferences want to have an alternate justification and they think that Res Life can provide it. How? Because the discussion sessions that are integral to Res Life programs require racial diversity. A key idea behind Res Life is that socio-economic progress can be made when individuals from different groups in society have to confront each other. Obviously, if the student body doesn’t have enough members of minority groups, these “intergroup dialogues” won’t be possible.